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which_chick) wrote2018-01-14 08:54 am
which_chick) wrote2018-01-14 08:54 am
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Someone asked me about commissions in knitting. I do not do commissions for a variety of reasons but the easiest one to explain to other people is economic. Wanna know (part of) why I don’t knit for hire?
TL;DR Nobody wants to pay four hundred damn dollars for a pair of artsy knee socks.
What you say? What I said. Here’s the math.
The yarn for the green & grey solstice socks that I am making is $25.00 a skein. It’s Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, you can buy it online in a variety of places. I like the handle and the gauge and how it knits up. It takes two skeins (one in each color) to make a pair of stranded-pattern knee socks for me. Materials cost: $50.00 in yarn. (I already own knitting needles suitable for this work.)
My hourly wage at my real job is $10.00 an hour. I feel like my sock-designing skills are worth At Least as much (on an aesthetic basis) as my tile-setting, toilet-unclogging, furnace-fixing, drywall patching landlord skills that I get paid actual money to do. I’ve spent (conservatively) about six hours designing the socks to have them come out the way I want. Some of that has been in fits and starts, but six hours feels about right. So, that’s $60.00 for the design work. (If I made these exact same socks again, or planned to, I could amortize the cost of the design work over all the pairs but knitting the same thing twice bores the living shit out of me, so that’s not very likely.)
In terms of knitting time, I don’t track that particularly closely. It takes me as long as it takes. But, since someone asked, I timed myself and got relatively dismal numbers.
The 2x2 corrugated ribbing takes me 15 minutes (I hate purling via “pick” and I suck at it) per round per sock because I just timed it. There are 24 rounds of this shit on two socks, so 48 rounds total which comes out to twelve freaking hours of horribly annoying corrugated ribbing. (It looks great. I hate doing it.)
The standard “charted” part takes twelve minutes per round. There are 21 inches of sock knitting that are charted, 12 rounds to the inch, so 252 rounds of charted sock, times 2 because there are two socks. Doing the math, the charted part is approximately 100 hours of knitting.
I am not a fast knitter but my tension is spot on and my consistency is fucking amazing. Let’s value my Knitting Labor at a whopping $3.00 an hour because I’m slow. (I am faster when I don’t have to read a fucking chart for every single damn stitch but for this pattern, I need to read the chart all the time.) Three dollars an hour is NOWHERE NEAR A LIVING WAGE, and I’m pointing that out here to emphasize how fucking little money it is.
So, when they’re done the Solstice Socks will be $50 in yarn, $60 in design, and $336 in labor (the twelve hours of corrugated ribbing plus the hundred hours of chart work) for a grand total of $446.00 for what are, in the end, knee socks. Fancy ones, yes, but knee socks. And that, tumblrites, is why I do not do commissions.
I’ve posted the pattern chart here and on ravelry. More-like-guidelines for making patterned knee socks are here, and that’s about all I can offer you. There’s a wealth of information out there for how to knit, how to knit stranded, and how to knit socks.
If you want amazing knee socks that are custom-tailored to fit your personal feet and legs AND you are neither independently wealthy nor equipped with a sweatshop of foreign children toiling to your will, the most reasonable way to make that happen is going to be “learn to knit and do it yourself”.
But… but… but… here’s five hundred dollars, will you knit for me?
No. I don’t care about money. That’s the other part about why I don’t do commissions. I don’t usually get into it because it’s harder to explain to other people.
TL;DR Nobody wants to pay four hundred damn dollars for a pair of artsy knee socks.
What you say? What I said. Here’s the math.
The yarn for the green & grey solstice socks that I am making is $25.00 a skein. It’s Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, you can buy it online in a variety of places. I like the handle and the gauge and how it knits up. It takes two skeins (one in each color) to make a pair of stranded-pattern knee socks for me. Materials cost: $50.00 in yarn. (I already own knitting needles suitable for this work.)
My hourly wage at my real job is $10.00 an hour. I feel like my sock-designing skills are worth At Least as much (on an aesthetic basis) as my tile-setting, toilet-unclogging, furnace-fixing, drywall patching landlord skills that I get paid actual money to do. I’ve spent (conservatively) about six hours designing the socks to have them come out the way I want. Some of that has been in fits and starts, but six hours feels about right. So, that’s $60.00 for the design work. (If I made these exact same socks again, or planned to, I could amortize the cost of the design work over all the pairs but knitting the same thing twice bores the living shit out of me, so that’s not very likely.)
In terms of knitting time, I don’t track that particularly closely. It takes me as long as it takes. But, since someone asked, I timed myself and got relatively dismal numbers.
The 2x2 corrugated ribbing takes me 15 minutes (I hate purling via “pick” and I suck at it) per round per sock because I just timed it. There are 24 rounds of this shit on two socks, so 48 rounds total which comes out to twelve freaking hours of horribly annoying corrugated ribbing. (It looks great. I hate doing it.)
The standard “charted” part takes twelve minutes per round. There are 21 inches of sock knitting that are charted, 12 rounds to the inch, so 252 rounds of charted sock, times 2 because there are two socks. Doing the math, the charted part is approximately 100 hours of knitting.
I am not a fast knitter but my tension is spot on and my consistency is fucking amazing. Let’s value my Knitting Labor at a whopping $3.00 an hour because I’m slow. (I am faster when I don’t have to read a fucking chart for every single damn stitch but for this pattern, I need to read the chart all the time.) Three dollars an hour is NOWHERE NEAR A LIVING WAGE, and I’m pointing that out here to emphasize how fucking little money it is.
So, when they’re done the Solstice Socks will be $50 in yarn, $60 in design, and $336 in labor (the twelve hours of corrugated ribbing plus the hundred hours of chart work) for a grand total of $446.00 for what are, in the end, knee socks. Fancy ones, yes, but knee socks. And that, tumblrites, is why I do not do commissions.
I’ve posted the pattern chart here and on ravelry. More-like-guidelines for making patterned knee socks are here, and that’s about all I can offer you. There’s a wealth of information out there for how to knit, how to knit stranded, and how to knit socks.
If you want amazing knee socks that are custom-tailored to fit your personal feet and legs AND you are neither independently wealthy nor equipped with a sweatshop of foreign children toiling to your will, the most reasonable way to make that happen is going to be “learn to knit and do it yourself”.
But… but… but… here’s five hundred dollars, will you knit for me?
No. I don’t care about money. That’s the other part about why I don’t do commissions. I don’t usually get into it because it’s harder to explain to other people.